Photoclubalpha

I've had my Alpha 850 since the start of the year, but have only really used it in the past couple of months due to work etc. It's fitted with a Sandisk 16GB card and everything has been working okay. But...

Today I went out and snapped a bunch of shots and when I got back home I put the card into the reader. A few of the photos appeared before it stalled loading, so I removed the card and tried it again. Then a message popped up saying it couldn't be read. Next I put the card back in the camera and was told the same - that I had to format the thing. This obviously meant all the pics were deleted.

I'm talking every single one that I've taken since I started using it... I've only saved a few that I was playing with on Photoshop. I was not a happy bunny.

Does anyone know why this may have happened? Is it the card or camera?

TIA

IMHO probably the card. With my A100 I had a new Sandisk CF fail within a few weeks of using it and had similar issues and messages appear. However I took the card along to a photo-processing shop and they were able to read it and saved all my images to a CD. May be worth trying before ditching the card and saying goodbye to your images.

My card was returned to the store from which I had purchased it, Warehouse Express who replaced it free of charge without any hassle. 3 years later, no further problem with my other Sandisk cards.

Another point to keep in mind, is the card a genuine Sandisk card or a counterfeit? If you read posts on this forum you will see that this is an issue that crops up from time to time.

Good luck

Ossie

Your SanDisk 16GB should have come with either a download link or an installation CD (possibly a mini-CD, if so use great care as these can damage some computer drives) for software called RescuePro. It's easy to spot this software on your computer if you installed it, as the icon for the program looks like a Sandisk card .

RescuePro may take an hour or three to scan your card, but even if the card has been formatted in your camera, it can normally recover the entire contents - just as long as you have not started taking pictures again on the re-formatted card.

Here is the link you need to get a trial version, if you did not get a serial number with your card. Counterfeit Sandisk cards of course didn't come with RescuePro but not all genuine ones do, either, depends on the card and the offer.

http://www.lc-tech.co.uk/software/rprodetail.html

David

Many thanks for your quick replies, Ossie and David

I just took the card back to the store and the guy gave me a new one. (It seems like a genuine one to me.) I can't put my hands on the RescuePro package that came with the original card, but will make sure I follow your examples and advice in the future.

Thanks again!

cycladelic wrote:I've had my Alpha 850 since the start of the year, but have only really used it in the past couple of months due to work etc. It's fitted with a Sandisk 16GB card and everything has been working okay. But...

Today I went out and snapped a bunch of shots and when I got back home I put the card into the reader. A few of the photos appeared before it stalled loading, so I removed the card and tried it again. Then a message popped up saying it couldn't be read. Next I put the card back in the camera and was told the same - that I had to format the thing. This obviously meant all the pics were deleted.

I'm talking every single one that I've taken since I started using it... I've only saved a few that I was playing with on Photoshop. I was not a happy bunny.

Does anyone know why this may have happened? Is it the card or camera?

TIA

For what its worth: I know a couple of professionals who do not use cards bigger then 8gb, simply because they do not want to lose 16 or 32gb of pictures. I can also tell you that I have an A850 and the only time I ever filled a 8bg card was when I was shooting fireworks for nearly an hour without a stop. Right now on the A850, I have 36 shots saved in both RAW and JPG, and the display tells me there are 129 more that I can take. So 8gb is good for a lot of work.

There are also a lot of phony cards coming from China. Sony has put out warnings about them.

Old Hydro wrote:For what its worth: I know a couple of professionals who do not use cards bigger then 8gb, simply because they do not want to lose 16 or 32gb of pictures. I can also tell you that I have an A850 and the only time I ever filled a 8bg card was when I was shooting fireworks for nearly an hour without a stop. Right now on the A850, I have 36 shots saved in both RAW and JPG, and the display tells me there are 129 more that I can take. So 8gb is good for a lot of work.

There are also a lot of phony cards coming from China. Sony has put out warnings about them.

This, or you can simply be diligent and download your pics everyday when shooting. One advantage to shooting high capacity cards is that they have faster download rates which make a difference when dealing with large files, esp when shooting at high frame rates....

Again, thanks for the above advice.

I'll get myself an 8GB card and try to save pics far more often.

Posted this somewhere else and thought I'd repost here, if anyone cares....

I have a couple of external hard drive where I store my stuff. 1 primary, 1 secondary. I dump all the files out of my camera on to the primary, and then the secondary. Once the files get on both the primary and seconday, they get nuked off the camera. I do all of my edits/PP work from the primary drive. PP'ed stuff gets saved to the primary, and print exports get saved to the hard drive on my computer. This is usually about 1% of what I shoot. I also have a third backup drive connected to my network that automatically backs up he photo folders my primary and secondary drives and the photo drive on my laptop (if it's up and running at 1 am when the auto backup starts) three days a week.

Files are stored on the primary and secondary basically by date, but by subject in a few cases.

If I am on the road, I Carry a 500 gb portable drive where I download my daily shots. However, even after I download my daily files to my HD, I try not to delete anything off my card until it is full. The good thing about the sony is it has two memory card slots, 1 CF and 1 memory stick. If I run out of space on the 16 gb CF card (about 460 shots) I will switch to an 8Gb memory stick. I have never managed to fill up both on one day. If I run out of camera space on the CF card, I create a temporary backup folder on my laptop until I can get home and download the portable HD to my primary and secondary drives.

Confusing? yes. Redundant? yes. In both systems I have at least two copies of each file at all times (well after I download off the camera at least). But I've lost enough data over the years to be paranoid. Storage is cheap these days. My time, not so much...

I simply use picasa to organize and sort. It works for me. I downloaded the lightroom trial ages ago, and didn't like the fact that it reorganized everything for me.

Hi, Lonnie

That's all very commendable and I do usually save shots on a daily basis when traveling, but that's because I fear getting my camera stolen and consequently losing them. I didn't expect my card to fail - it wasn't that old and was quite pricey. I have learned a lesson.

Out of all the cards I have used both SD an CF I have had 2 cards fail both Sandisk top end ones. Both were replaced by the retailer but the loss of the images are annoying.
I no longer buy Sandisk just good quality other makes, and have had no other failings.
Regards
richard

scooterman - which ones have you bought? I was thinking of getting a Transcend one.

cycladelic wrote:scooterman - which ones have you bought? I was thinking of getting a Transcend one.

I do use Transcend class 6 4gb cards I find them ok.
Never had a problem with those and they come at the right price.
regards
richard

An update:

The same thing has happened to the second Sandisk card - the same 16GB, 60MS/s model.

I took it back to the store and the assistant gave me a new one. However, when I went to check out the Transcend store to get their view (I was in a computer/camera department store here) the sales guy looked at my card reader and noticed one of the pins was bent. Ouch. The design of the reader was really at fault, as the CF port is very shallow, making correct alignment quite hard. I binned it and bought a Transcend reader, which has a much deeper port, with the pins better protected.

The Sandisk seller said it could be a virus in my computer that has caused the problems, but perhaps it was the card reader at fault (?).

Ouch! I have always had this fear using the CF system. I hope you have more luck with the Transcend reader. I recently had to replace my reader. I have no idea how old it was but I found it couldn't cope with anything over 4Gb. Needless to say the replacement is a lot faster . I guess the reader is a part of the overall system that it is easy to neglect.

cycladelic wrote:the sales guy looked at my card reader and noticed one of the pins was bent. Ouch. The design of the reader was really at fault, as the CF port is very shallow, making correct alignment quite hard. I binned it and bought a Transcend reader, which has a much deeper port, with the pins better protected.

I've had this experience as well. One of the pins in the card reader/writer is longer than the others and is particularly vulnerable. Most of the cheap 'multi' card readers have a shallow slot for CF cards, which make it almost impossible to deliver the card at precisely the correct angle, and the long pin gets bent and no transfer of data can take place. My A900 and the card reader on my computer are fine, because the slot is sufficiently deep, and the card travels between the guide rails some distance before being delivered to the pins. My old Jessops card reader (I need a separate reader for use with my laptop) is also OK, but when I bought a new reader as a backup I found it useless for CF cards. I looked to replace it and found many different card readers on sale and almost all of them (including Jessops' current model) are no good! I'm surprised that I hadn't seen reports of this problem before, but perhaps hardly anyone uses CF cards these days, except for the few of us using high-end dSLR's.

It's a manky design, and the SD card looks to have a much more robust interface between card and reader